CMS has finalized a bump for Medicare Advantage plans that's a good deal higher than the agency's initial proposal that met with fierce industry opposition. Meanwhile, researchers look at a variety of factors when it comes to spending and safety nets.

Advisers were braced for HHS Secretary Alex Azar or CMS Administrator Seema Verma to abruptly leave the Trump administration as they waged an increasingly public and personal feud last year. The issue has since seemed to simmer down. In other HHS and CMS news, a new study looks at what Medicare paid for undelivered post-op visits in 2018.

Employers and payers are piloting programs that offer people monetary incentives for switching to lower-priced providers. In a recent evaluation of such rewards programs, published in Health Affairs, researchers found a 2.1% reduction in medical pricing, a savings of $2.3 million annually for services targeted by the rewards program.

In this week’s news, a study carried out by Apple and Stanford enrolled 4,000 participants to determine if the Apple watch would be able to predict a patient’s risk of heart attack or stroke. Meanwhile, Teladoc’s Q3 reports 62% revenue growth in Q3 and other news

The review carried out by researchers from the RAND Corporation discovered that the research base for palliative care was larger than generally appreciated, although there was limited evidence across some areas of clinical practice such as how to care for patients during the last days of their lives.

The tool known as Personalized Hospital Performance report Card allows individuals choose the data they feel it’s most important to them which may include mortality, readmissions, safety of care, timeliness of care, patient experience, efficient use of medical imaging and effectiveness of care.

Some of the reasons the physicians were not enticed according to the study were delayed payments, pay increases which lasted only two years and doctors being mandated to submit documentation to in order to qualify for more funds.

Geisinger Health system based in Pennsylvania plans to implement DNA sequencing into primary care in the nearest future as they believe that Americans are spending too much on medical bills and that DNA sequencing would decrease such medical expense a lot.

Politics are unlikely to be excluded from the long-awaited VA reforms as they await the bill being signed into law by President Trump. There are still reimbursement concerns by care providers under the proposed bill

Despite the challenges faced by health globally which comprises lack of accessible and affordable healthcare, advent of chronic and untreatable diseases, antibiotic resistance, etc. there is hope as new technology is introduced to healthcare.

Chi-En Lin is the Metrohm Young Chemist Award Winner for his research on determining the optimal biomarker frequency for biosensors. His research described how these biosensors can be applied. Determining optimal biomarker frequencies for multiplexed biosensors has numerous uses which include dry diagnostics, methodologies of rapidly screening cancer, detection of comorbidities before they become

A study using 3D simulation has made researchers understand how the brain reacts to medically induced cooling. The main benefits were that this medically induced cooling could help treat head injuries and sicknesses such as stroke. It could also reduce the risk of birth complications.

Commencement of early-stage clinical trial testing to determine the safety of two human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) which is designed to provide treatment to people infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV). The clinical experiments are to be completed by June 2019 as there is currently no specific treatment for MERS.

Scott Gottlieb, MD, chief of FDA, puts great hopes in AI for decision support, EHR, and medical devices of the future. The FDA is planning to adjust the approval and decision making process with the use of machine learning and prediction analysis.